A 3 metre by 3 metre vertical shaft was blasted 165 metres through the rock to the Busty Seam 400 metres down the fell from Annie and Fortune Pits. It did not need to be connected above ground as it would not haul coal. One man with his pony and tub supplied the steam powered beam engine with coal from a drift down the Whiteside Gill valley, using a ‘Tramway’.
The picture shows two ladies in the bottom deck of the two deck cage descending Fell Pit in the 1930s. John Dunn, the colliery engineer is wearing a bowler hat. There were many major disasters in Durham collieries with huge death tolls, but the worst fatal accident at Burnhope was when Fell Pit rope broke on 23rd November 1893 killing four men in the pair of cages. There were nearly 100 recorded deaths at Burnhope Colliery, but the record is probably incomplete. Durham mining museum records for County Durham that there were two deaths per thousand employed each year until 1890 falling to one death per thousand employed each year after 1920. There were many more unrecorded serious accidents. At key places underground, there were locked boxes in cavities let into the wall containing morphine, so that colliery officials could administer first aid to casualties. Mining was dangerous, yet the abiding memory of past miners is: “I would go down again.”
